Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm Tracy Kerr and I'm Amy Barton. And this is a brainstorm. Are you waiting on tenterhooks to hear what it's about? Okay. I am, but I thought it was Tinder hooks. No, it's Tenter hooks. I think you're making things up. Totally. I'm not. So, so that waiting on tenterhooks is a little phrase that I've always heard and you kind of know by context like you're eagerly awaiting your, your stretch to the max because you're excited and
Speaker 1 00:32 Ooh,
Speaker 0 00:34 well I just have a quick question though. So you're saying T E? N? T? E? R? Yes. Tenter. Yup. Cause like I said, I've always heard Tinder. Is that like something that we've mutated and made weird? Okay. Because the phrase tenterhooks comes from tenters were actually wooden frames that were used as far back as the 14th century. They're very old for making wool cloth and you still see this. So knitters and crochet hairs that work in wool and natural fibers, you will call this blocking. I think they have a finished piece and you want it to be in a specific shape. My grandma used to block out crochet things and so it would be needles on a piece of cork board and she would lay her fabric flat and stretch it. Yeah. So like, cause when you're working on it, you kind of work it out of shape and then if you wanted it to be a square yup.
Speaker 0 01:25 You would have to make it be a square. And this is the ancient origin of that where fabrics would have been, uh, died and they would have oil in them and you know, not very processed yet. And dirt from the fleece. Cause this is animal fur that they're using to make a thing. Yeah. So after the cloth was woven, it still had all that grind minute and a person called a fuller or also a Tucker or a Walker cleaned the wool cloth or whatever it was in the mill. And then they would put it on these, these frames and they'd be outside and you'd see big fields of them. So in England there's a place called Tenter fields. In South Wales there's Tenterfield and in Australia lots of places with that name on it. Wow. So you would see fields and fields, especially if there was a place near sheep farms. Yeah. One of the places where they make the wool. So that's where it comes from. Now you know, when you're waiting on tenterhooks, you might have a nice plaid pattern or a nice fair aisle. Tenterhooks Oh, I've been saying it wrong all this time. All right. I guess I've learned something. That's good times. I like to be right. I like to fix that. I dunno. There's nothing that really needed fixing, I guess. No, I needed that to be fixed. Yeah.
Speaker 0 02:46 So if you're not on tender Tenter Oh, see, I just didn't. Again, if you're not on tenterhooks, we're on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcast, and you can find us on Twitter as at my brain junk. Amy and I will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know. And I guarantee you will not be bored.
